


honey don't feed me, i will come back

by DeerKing



Category: iZombie (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Cannibalism, F/M, Love Sex and Murder, Slow Burn, Unethical Experimentation, my staples really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 18:14:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13816716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerKing/pseuds/DeerKing
Summary: Ravi takes a moment to really contemplate how extreme normalization of death, murder, and cannibalism in his everyday life had crossed some very important wires in his brain.





	honey don't feed me, i will come back

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all might want to keep in mind that I have Hannibal roots, so something I may consider a mildly weird depiction of sex, murder and cannibalism might be a bit too much for anyone who is squeamish about the canon typical depictions of cannibalism. You've been warned, here there be Weird Shit.

From what little Blaine had told him, Ravi had assumed he’d be sneaking into a large facility, possibly a big evil warehouse of some sort. Some place befitting a league of mysterious zombie snatchers. What Ravi finds when he rolls up to what his GPS tells him is the address Blaine gave him, is a shabby little apartment building on a corner street surrounded by a wooded area with a smattering of family owned convenience stores, a trailer park, and a gas station in its vicinity.

Either Blaine was fucking with him, or Liv had been kidnapped by people who couldn’t even bother to spring for a discreet storage facility to keep their stolen zombie in. Ravi felt almost insulted on her behalf. They must be good, though, to have kept her contained and unnoticed for 2 weeks, doing whatever it is they’re doing to her in there. The very thought sends a sharp bout of nausea Ravi feels all the way up to his throat that has him tightly gripping the handgun in his jacket pocket and scrambling out of his car.

Major’s been stockpiling weaponry like he’s planning on melting them all down and making his own Game of Thrones style gun chair. He won’t notice one little missing gun, at least, not until Ravi has Liv safely back home and/or dies horribly in the rescue attempt.

Why, you may ask, was Ravi storming the apartment building where who knows how many morally bankrupt zombie-nappers must reside all by his lonesome? Because Blaine is an arsehole, Ravi may have replied. What else is new. Well, to be fair this is for once not actually Blaine’s fault, he was just the messenger.

After a week and a half of Major, Peyton, Clive, and Dale all coming back to the house only to shake their head at him, telling him they’d pulled all their respective strings and no one had yet to find his missing best friend, Ravi had felt the panic and dread clawing at his throat like a physical thing. He hadn’t slept in days.

It felt like the day his big sister had run away from home, but far, far worse. He was only 8 then, she was 12, Ravi supposed he just hadn’t had enough knowledge of the world to fully fear what might have happened to her if their uncle hadn’t found her brooding on a park bench, cold and hungry but otherwise unharmed, the very next morning.

Now, though, Ravi knew in vivid, technicolor detail the terrifying things that went bump in the night. His job at the morgue along with his more recent life experiences gave his imagination all the ammunition it needed to paralyze him with fear for what could possibly be happening to Liv as each day passed. What could have already happened. Christ.

When Eva and Evan dropped by the house looking for answers Peyton was too frazzled and busy to give them, Ravi had had enough. He endured a painfully sullen brunch with them, then looked them both in the eye and swore to them on his life that he’d bring Liv home. Once they’d left, Ravi had called Blaine. He was insufferably smug about it, but a quick, casual mention of how distraught Peyton was did the trick.

“What would I do without my favorite partner in crime reluctantly teaming up with me when the chips are down?” He’d said, playing at being wistful.

Ravi had thanked him through clenched teeth before hanging up and collapsing on the couch. Blaine DeBeers was officially his last hope at finding Olivia Moore alive. The following panic attack was inevitable.

Three days later Blaine called him.

“Found her,” is all he’d said. He then hung up, texted him the address, and refused to answer his phone again. Shady prick.

Running off half-cocked with nothing but blind panic and a pilfered gun was not Ravi’s greatest move, but Liv had already been missing for two weeks. He works with the Seattle police department, he watches Law & Order, he knows how much the odds of finding anything but a corpse plummets after the first day. There was no time to assemble the avengers.

So he’d gathered his coat, a gun, and his courage and ran out the door.

Ravi tries the front door just to confirm that it is, in fact, locked, then promptly hits every buzzer until he gets an answer.

“Jerry, I swear to Christ, if you’re here to whine about your piece of shit boyfriend you refuse to break up with again I’m going to strangle you with your own intestines.”

Buzz. The door’s unlocked. Ravi shrugs and waltzes straight in, choosing to take this odd bit of luck as a sign that he may not die today.

Apartment 42 was the one he was looking for, according to Blaine. Ravi dearly hopes this is actually the secret headquarters of zombie obsessed, possibly cult involved kidnappers and not, like, the apartment of a single mother and her two year old kid or something. What motivation does Blaine really have to help him save Liv anyway, other than impress Peyton? Unfortunately, Ravi has no other leads, and he’s officially That Desperate.

One worry dissipates and a whole host of others surface when he successfully picks the lock and opens the door.

“Liv,” Ravi says, breathes it out like it was punched out of him. There she is, his best friend, crouched down in what looks to be an extremely reinforced dog cage in the middle of an otherwise normal looking flat. There’s a couch and a recliner behind her, a flat screen TV in front on a modest entertainment system, like they put it on for her when they leave to keep her occupied. Like they might use the cage as an ottoman they prop their feet up on while they watch the game. Oh, and she’s staring right at him with blood red eyes, utterly focused, yet uncomprehending.

The sight is so arresting Ravi only notices the man standing to the right of her cage when he turns around and shouts, reaching for what looks like a cattle prod resting on the top of the cage. Ravi’s focus narrows, his mind goes blank but for vague memories of countless shooting lessons with Clive and Major, and a vague thought that he looks like an accountant, utterly plain, wearing a pair of slightly wrinkled slacks and a button up shirt. He could be anyone. Next think he knows, the muffled shot of a bullet going through a silencer goes off and the man in question collapses in front Liv’s cage like a sack of potatoes.

And there it is. Head shot.

Ravi’s a murderer.

He knows he can’t afford to have a break down in the middle of a crime scene of his own making, so he kicks the apartment door closed and scans the perimeter, checking the bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen for possible witnesses/evil scientists before rushing back to Liv’s cage while she grunts and shouts at him through the bars.

The cage has a digital padlock on it. Ravi swears under his breathe, then keeps up a steady stream of gentle, comforting nonsense at Liv, who is worryingly still red eyed and furious as ever, as he searches the dead man for info. He ends up finding a faded four digit code written in sharpie on the man’s palm. Ravi rolls his eyes and feels another pang of personal offense on Liv’s behalf. Honestly, these people have kept her hidden away for two weeks when half of Seattle is out looking for her and they’re apparently the type to need to write passcodes down on their hand?

Shameful.

Ravi doesn’t think about the ramifications of his actions until he’s entered the passcode and ripped open the door. He only has a split second to marvel, dumbfounded, at his faulty survival instincts before Liv springs out like a caged tiger, pinning him to the floor with one hand to the throat.

“Liv,” he chokes out, trying to keep his fingers in between her hand and his fragile windpipe while his other hand grips desperately at her elbow, “Liv, it’s just me, just— just silly old Ravi, you remember me, don’t you? Your favorite wacky side kick? Liv?”

She stops actively trying to strangle him the death, but her grip is still just a little too tight, keeping him down. Her thumb digs into his skin just below his jaw, just enough to make him feel dizzy. For a couple of long, quiet moments she just... stares at him.

It makes him feel unsettlingly like prey. Like a small rabbit being stared down, coldly considered by a wolf contemplating whether or not he’s worth the effort it would take to snap his neck.

This isn’t the first time he’s been stared down by this wolf, though, and even as his lizard brain screams at him to claw his way out from under this apex predator’s gaze, he knows deep down in his soul that Liv would never hurt him.

He gives her a strained, fragile smile and forces himself to go limp, dropping both his arms down around his head in surrender.

She tilts her head like a curious dog.

Then, slowly, she lets up on his neck and for a moment everything goes a little fuzzy as blood rushes back to Ravi’s brain.

It is at that moment that Ravi notices a _completely inappropriate response to mortal danger_ making his pants feel uncomfortably tight.

Well.

One crisis at a time here.

“Hey, there we go, you know me, don’t you Liv? Just Ravi, no threat here, just here to take you home.”

Only then does she finally take her eyes off him, her hand moving to press firmly on the center of his chest instead as she sets her hungry gaze on the man Ravi just shot.

The man’s steadily leaking head is inches away from Ravi’s shoulder so all Liv has to do is scoot up so she’s sitting low on his chest before she’s clawing at the man’s skull and smashing it against the blood-soaked carpet, fast and wild, like a starving coyote.

 _God, what if they’d starved her_ , Ravi thinks suddenly, _what if she’s like Marcy, what if I can’t bring her back_?

But no, Marcy had been severely deteriorated. Like a real walking corpse. Liv looked like normal but for her dark eyes and pronounced, blue veins. She did seem to be having trouble getting into his victim’s head, and Ravi very much wanted her to just get it over with and eat the man so he could get out from under her and never think about this again.

After a couple more seconds of Ravi just sort of lying there with his eyes tightly closed as Liv squirmed and snarled on top of him, she slowed and let out an odd, low whine Ravi had never heard any raged out zombie make. Reluctantly he peaks through one eye at a now blood-soaked Liv and for the first time notices that there is something very wrong with the hand she hadn’t tried to strangle him with. Every single finger on that hand is horribly broken, stuck at odd angles and all dark blues and greens. Like someone had taken a hammer to her hand multiple times. Bile rises in Ravi’s throat and his traitorous dick finally deflates like a popped balloon animal.

Nothing like a little light torture to kill the mood, huh.

“Fuck, Liv, what did they do to you,” He says under his breath, he gets no response other than a low grunt and another half-hearted attempt to crack the man’s skull open on the floor. She looks at him pointedly and he’s almost delighted to see some intelligence, some good old Liv flavored condescension in those inhuman eyes.

“You want me to help you crack him open?” He asks reluctantly. Another low whine, Ravi sighs, “you have to let me up then, love.”

She concedes by scooting back down to sitting on his stomach, like she’s afraid he’ll run off and leave her to fend for herself if she isn’t there to hold him down. Ravi rises on his elbows and twists around as best he can so he can contemplate the corpse lying beside him.

Ravi has worked for long enough at the morgue, he’s seen a lot of dead bodies. A lot of them violently murdered. He’s got a thick skin when it comes to these things. This, though. This man has very recently been murdered by yours truly, and he is about to smash his skull in so his feral zombie friend can eat him. This is a whole other level.

After a deep breath, Ravi grabs his gun, switches the safety back on and smashes the butt right where the bullet entered his skull, where Liv had clawed and gnawed the skin away. Then again, then twice more, until there is a sizable hole for him to be able to reach in and scoop out a dollop of brains.

 _Like ice cream_ , he thinks dizzily before Liv dives in and eats the scoop right off his hand. Ravi’s brain goes off-line for a couple seconds. When Liv licks and sucks leftover blood from his fingers his jaw drops open involuntarily and his stomach turns with something that's a little bit horror and a little bit... something else. Ravi takes a moment to really contemplate how extreme normalization of death, murder, and cannibalism in his everyday life had crossed some very important wires in his brain.

This is his best friend. He’s never thought about her like that, not on horny librarian brain, not on stripper brain or dominatrix brain, not on the many occasions that they’d pretended to be dating, engaged, married, not even when she’d breathed out the words “I love you, Ravi,” low and devastated, and he’d told her he loved her too. But now she’s mindless, she’s violent, she’s hungry, she could bite his fingers off like carrots if she wanted to and he's feeling something not at all appropriate to the situation.

Oh, sweet zombie Jesus.

Ravi lets out a little strangled noise and takes his hand back from her, cradling it to his chest. She looks at him again and he can’t even meet her eyes, his face feels hot and prickly like he’s 14 again and telling Heather Grace that he likes her hair.

14 year old Ravi had no clue how humiliating life could get for him. Two decades later and here he is, hand feeding a zombie and feeling a bit like the Bella Swan to her Edward.  Damn his sister for forcing every detail of Twilight on him.

“R… Ravi…?”

Ravi’s head snaps up immediately, and Liv is now looking at him with dazed, green eyes.

“Liv!” Ravi can’t help shouting, he shoots up and pulls her eyelids open to look at how they’re dilating, see if there’s any red still lining them, before she bats him away.

“Hungry,” is all she says, quiet and far away.

“Okay Liv, okay, we’ve got a nice, fresh brain for you here, let’s get you back to yourself, yeah?”

Liv is still hungry, and Ravi is terrified to know what all she’s been through while she’s been kept here, but she’s back. She’s here and she’s coherent and he didn’t realize how much the worry and the not knowing hurt deep in his chest until it released the vice on his heart. So what if he just killed a man then discovered some strange new fetish with his recently tortured best friend shortly after, Liv is alive and he’d freak out once she was safely home.

But Liv is still hungry, so he feeds her the rest of the brain and keeps his mind firmly on his relief that he’s got her back.

-

 Liv is sleeping in the passenger seat of his car when he calls Blaine again, a cardboard box full of pilfered notebooks he'd found around the kidnapper's apartment in the back seat.  

"What's in it for me?"

Ravi sighs and rolls his eyes, "because I have a 2 year head start on everyone else working on a cure, and you don't want the cure man going to prison for murder, and, I don't know accessory to cannibalism?"

"If they were putting people in prison for that one we'd all be locked up Chakrabarti."

"Yeah, well–"

"So you've finally crossed over to team murder, huh?"

"If you must know, I crossed over to that team a while ago."

That one shut him up.

"Happened the last time someone tried to take Liv."

The "from me" is on the tip of Ravi's tongue before he decides he's been creepy enough today.

"Huh," Ravi is absurdly pleased with himself for the lack of smarmy tone in his voice, "I'll try not to underestimate you then, doc.  Fine, I'll do it."

"You'll get rid of the body?  Don't forget to burn the apartment, there was too much blood in that carpet, but don't do it until you've evacuated the building, make it look like a gas leak–"

"Yeah, Yeah, this isn't my first rodeo Doctor Death, I'll get it done."

"Thanks."

"Whatever, you owe me."

The line goes dead.

"Well.  Don't like the sound of that," Ravi mutters to himself.

-

Ravi waits until after he's gone through the painful process of resetting Liv's mangled fingers and putting them in make-shift splints from whatever he could find in Major's giant first aid kit and gives her an entire bottle of fireball whiskey for her to do with what she will before he starts in on anything.  Once they're sitting on the couch and Liv is covered in every single blanket Ravi could find around the house he wiggles and shifts until he's sitting cross-legged, facing her completely.

"I just have three questions for you right now, Liv, and then you can go rest, or drink or watch mindless TV with me, whatever you want to do, yeah?"

The wary look she gives him behind haunted eyes hurts as much as anything else he's seen today, but she just nods and gives him a quiet, "okay Ravi."

"Question number one, do you want to talk about what happened to you while you were missing?"

Immediately she's shaking her head, "Not– not right now, I can't, it's too–"

"Too fresh," he finishes for her, broadcasting his movements as much as he can before he puts an arm around her shoulders, "I know Liv, I figured, I just want you to know you can talk to me when you want to."

She gives him a weak little smile and scoots herself and Ravi's anxiety induced blanket mountain closer to him, "Question number two?"

"Do you want me to send out a group text to the gang letting them know I found you?"

He knows from her immediate pained expression that she doesn't want him to, but knows she should.

"Okay," he says, before she can say anything, "how about we wait a bit, then we'll let the people know their savior has risen?"

"They should at least know I'm not dead, Ravi–"

"Maybe I just want to keep you to myself for a couple hours, hm?  Finders keepers and all that."

Liv rolls her eyes at him and hides a smile in his shoulder, "what's question three?"

"What do you want to do now?"

For a couple quiet seconds she just breathes into Ravi's shirt, and he relishes the feel of it, of the weight of her on him, knowing she's here and alive and he brought her back to him.  Ravi is pointedly deciding not to think about what happened before she rejoined the land of complex thought, possibly forever, but he'll never deny to himself or anyone that he loves this girl.  That she's his best friend and his family and he'd do anything to keep her with him.

"I could go for some Zombie High season 2?"

He lets out an agonized groan and briefly contemplates amending that thought, "of course you do, you sneaky thing, you know this is the one single circumstance in which you could force me to watch this show."

He continues to hem and haw and whine as he puts the disk in the console; and she throws cheetos at him and cackles as he collapses by her side.

"I love you, Liv."

"I love you too, Ravi."

**Author's Note:**

> Don't judge Ravi too harshly (or me for that matter), he's been through an emotional roller coaster lately, he can't help his weird boners.


End file.
